Some increase and vary their offerings, while others reinvent themselves

Fort Collins Brewery

Fort Collins Brewery’s newly designed graphics.

By

JasonNotte

Freshness is a key component to craft beer, even when it comes to branding and marketing.

With the nation’s brewery count exceeding 4,200 and craft beer’s novelty giving way to neighborhoods packed with breweries, it requires great effort on the part of older brewers to stand out.

Sierra Nevada first set up in Chico, Calif., in 1979, but led the recent charge for East Coast expansion when it announced plans for a brewery in Mills River, N.C., in 2012. It has since updated its beer offerings Nooner Pilsner, Hop Hunter IPA and Otra Vez Gose, while positioning its Torpedo IPA as a co-flagship with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

There have been other rebranding efforts in recent years. Fort Collins, Colo.-based New Belgium (founded in 1991) began completely relabeling its lineup in 2013 and has since tweaked the recipes of mainstay beers including Abbey and Trippel, and opened a second facility in Asheville, N.C. Last year, Deschutes Brewing Co. in Bend, Ore. (founded in 1988) redesigned its labels just a few months before announcing plans for a new facility in Roanoke, Va.

From Hood River, Ore.-based Full Sail Brewing’s (founded 1987) comprehensive relabeling in the wake of its sale to a private-equity firm to Tröegs Independent Brewing’s (founded as Tröegs Brewing Co. in 1996) completely redrawn identity, older breweries have been revisiting their brands and fighting for both relevance and shelf space in a crowded market. Colorful, art-heavy labeling from the ’80s and ’90s is giving way to monochromatic design that minimizes artwork in favor of the brewer’s and beer’s name.

Fort Collins Brewery in Fort Collins, Colo., is all too familiar with the process. The spot where Fort Collins Brewery opened in its first incarnation, as H.C. Berger Brewing Co., in 1992 has been occupied by small-batch, Belgian-style brewery Funkwerks since 2009. Its current location is right next door to both the larger Odell Brewing Co. (which has existed since 1989) and the upstart Snowbank Brewing (founded in 2014). It is roughly two blocks away from New Belgium’s campus and now shares Fort Collins with more than 15 other breweries (including an Anheuser-Busch InBev plant, brewpub and beer garden).

Tom and Jan Peters took control of Fort Collins Brewery from its original owners in 2004 and had run it as a traditional, German-style brewery while expanding its distribution to more than two dozen states. As the years progressed and tastes changed, however, Fort Collins Brewery began to feel a bit stale. Brands like its Z, Edgar, Doktor and Kidd Lagers and balanced Rocky Mountain IPA weren’t matching palates that were shifting to more progressively hopped India Pale Ales and sour beers. Meanwhile, art-heavy labels for beers like its Major Tom’s Pomegranate Wheat looked as if they’d been frozen in place for more than a decade.

As a result, sales stagnated, distribution territories withered and Fort Collins Brewery’s namesake town openly wondered if it sold any beer there. In 2014, the Peters’ daughter, Tina, was moved into brewery ownership and began addressing some of the dust that had gathered on the family brewery. She revamped the brewery’s staff, began using the brewery’s tavern as a testing ground for its beers (including an Oktoberfest that won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival last year) and, this year, overhauled the brand’s labeling and began putting core styles in cans.

Though some of the more drastic changes involved removing entire states from the brewery’s distribution radius, refocusing on Colorado and Fort Collins in particular helped boost demand from 9,000 barrels last year to a projected 12,000 barrels in 2016. We spoke with Tina Peters just as Fort Collins Brewery’s redesigned packaging debuted and discussed the brewery’s place in Fort Collins, its continued quest for relevance and its customers’ role in building their ideal brewery by committee.

Fort Collins Brewery

Tina Peters, Fort Collins Brewery

We hear from the folks at New Belgium and Odell quite a bit and see Funkwerks’ beers kicking around a lot, but this is one of the first times we’ve seen a push from Fort Collins Brewery. Is this a deliberate effort on your part to let people know you’re there, too?

Tina Peters: That’s been our main focus. We’ve been here for a pretty long time and, just during the last few years, we’ve really started to focus on our marketing and PR. We’re always happy to hear that people are finally hearing about it, but it’s hard to just say “come on in.” But we’re getting better about it and plugging away.

You’ve seen this brewery evolve since the early 2000s. What did you see in 2014 that made you want to take a more active interest in the brewery?

Peters: I’ve really kind of been around since things started, and I remember Tom kind of came up to me and said: “I want to buy this brewery. It’s not doing well.” He’s always had a very strong background in manufacturing and having a product.

I remember thinking: “Oh, this is an interesting mid-life crisis for you to be going through.” Then I went into the brewery in its original location, which if you’re familiar with Fort Collins is where Funkwerks is now, and I had my first pint of Kidd, which was their black lager that they had on tap, and my life has never been the same since. I called Tom up and said: “Yes, you’ve got to do this; this is cool.”

I started really getting into that craft beer theme in late 2003, early 2004, and I was really just kind of starting to try everything and travel. I started doing brew tours around here and then I started traveling and doing beer tourism, checking out all the coasts and what people had to offer for beer. It became a huge part of my life and culture, and I’ve really never looked back since then.

Fort Collins Brewery

Fort Collins Brewery’s old IPA brand.

Fort Collins Brewery

Fort Collins Brewery’s new IPA brand.

You established Fort Collins Brewery as the only brewer in Fort Collins focusing exclusively on German beer styles. What made you choose that option for differentiation and what role did Fort Collins’ beer culture play in that decision?

Peters: Early on, our brewmaster had a very strong German background and, as a family, we are about 75% German. We went to Germany a lot as kids and I had my first beer at Oktoberfest when I was about six.

I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying that, but it’s always been a big part of our culture. Being German and Polish, it’s a lot based on beer and it’s a lot based on food. Working with Sandy Jones, our original brewmaster, he shared that crisp, clean palate, and that’s always had a thread in the beers that I’ve been a part of enjoying and brewing and drinking. I’m a big balanced beer drinker, and we’ve always tried to do our best to retain that crispness and that lagering time in our beers.

As the market has changed, obviously, we’ve expanded into other styles so we can provide more variety for our consumer. With so many beers here in Fort Collins and with the amazing beer culture that we have, it kind of forces us to keep challenging ourselves and to keep adding variety, which we love. We want to be seen as an innovator in our community instead of just following along, but we have a hef[eweizen] still in our lineup. Our Oktoberfest, which won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival last year, is definitely making its return next year. Our Red Banshee kind of shifted more into an altbier category.

We really like to make sure we’re keeping that core philosophy from when we started, but being able to evolve and move along with our customers ... as their palates keep expanding, we feel that we need to do the same and give them the best products we can.

Still, you’re going through a fairly thorough rebranding effort. Fort Collins Brewery’s core beers from 2003 don’t exist anymore. How have your drinkers changed in that time and what can you do within the personality of your brewery to adapt to the times and remain relevant?

Peters: I’ve kind of held every position here at the brewery. I’ve been in the tasting room, I’ve been in sales, I’ve put together six packs, I’ve done some brewing, I’ve done cellar work. As that progression kept changing, I wanted to make sure I understood every aspect of the industry we were in.

That eventually shifted to general management of the brewery itself and then we added our restaurant in 2011. It took a significant amount of time to get that baby up and running and to figure out how we cook with beer and how we pair with beer. How do we make sure that’s the best representation of FCB as a whole and not a separate entity? Once the restaurant got a few years under its belt, that allowed me to step into the role of owner and allowed Tom and Jan to take a step back, retire, enjoy the hard work they put in and just come in and enjoy the beer and food.

Last year, in particular, was a time for me to reflect and say: “If this is what I want to have out on the market, what should that look like? What beers do we really enjoy drinking, what beers do I want our customers to have and what brand do I want to point to and say, “yep, that’s my brand and that’s what I want people to think.” That’s when we started tweaking recipes, looking at the lineup and look at, as a team, what are we really excited about drinking, what do we like reading about in press articles and what are we bringing back to the brewery when we travel.

I’m a very visual person and my background was in photography and design before I got into this, so that led to the belief that the image of FCB should fit in with our new styles of beer. We hadn’t really done a rebrand or overhaul in eight to 10 years, so we sat down and said: “It’s time; let’s bite the bullet and let’s make sure that the beers we put out match the look of our new packaging.”

How have those styles shifted away from your German-oriented beginnings? Has the reemergence of German styles like kolsch and gose helped your brewery?

Peters: It’s a struggle for us with customers. We released our first saison last year and people were like: “Huh, German brewery releasing a saison.”

I think we’ve really tried to say, as a lot of breweries have, that, yes, we can do German [styles] really well and we love them and respect them, but we also want to try new things. Our brewers want to expand, we want to be able to expand and I think the community itself is starting to break down that wall of “Oh, Odell only does English beers.” They don’t. They do all sorts of beers, and they do them really well. New Belgium is a fantastic example of a brewery that has Belgium in its name, and yet it’s releasing non-Belgian beers and just killing it. Some of the seasonals that they’ve been putting out have been just fantastic to try, and they have nothing to do with Belgian-style beer.

I think we’ve been trying to continue that approach to not being put in that box or behind that barrier where we can only do German [styles]. We’ve really wanted to test out other yeast strains and bring on different products. We started playing with sours a lot last year, which is a long process so we’ll see those come out at the end of the year. We started our barrel program which has given us time to be able to play and have fun.

I think the tavern really opens up a great opportunity for us to do small batches, get it out to the consumer and get feedback. That’s what we rely on: What do our customers think? We’re on Untappd all the time, we’re on RateBeer, we have customer comment cards in the tavern. We want to know what their feedback is and what their palates are evolving to. We always get surprised when things we think are super innovative or off the wall get responses that are “yeah, no problem, we’ve already done that.” Now we know we have to go a little further and keep them engaged and excited.

A taproom or brewpub is basically like having a brewery focus group at your disposal each day during business hours. Were there beer ideas that didn’t fly in the pub that you ended up scrapping and were there ideas that you weren’t enthusiastic about that your customers pushed through?

Peters: Last year we really started getting into barrel-aged beers and I think we saw toward the end of that where people were like “yeah, OK, we can kind of get that anywhere. Oh, you did a barrel-aged stout? OK.”

We really took that and said we weren’t going to do the bourbon and the whiskey barrels and were going to look more toward the tequila and the gin. We have a rum-barrel-aged beer coming out next year and we’re seeing that starting to pique people’s interest a little more. We definitely saw the feedback of “Great, you use a local whiskey guy? Fantastic. What else do you have?” That became a wake-up call acknowledging that so many breweries were doing great barrel-aged beers that we wanted to take it one step further.

We do a lot of fruit beers and enjoy doing that here, but we mainly keep those in the tavern as much as possible. We saw some great successes when we were playing with passionfruit, grapefruit and things like that. We did a bunch of herb-focused beers like lemon thyme and basil ... those didn’t do as well. Customers wanted to see fruits they know and could relate to. We did a plum-fig beer, and it just did not go well for us. They didn’t care for it, the comment cards came back, and we ended up pulling it out of the pub and destroying it. I took one home for my Kegerator, because I loved it, and the rest got dumped down the drain.

That means an awful lot to us: What our customers are saying. If they aren’t loving it, we aren’t going to force beers on them that they don’t want. That’s not the industry that we’re in. It’s about our customers and what they’re going to relate to as our brand and believe in our brand. It only takes one bad beer, and customers don’t come back. I think it’s balancing that ego of standing behind our brand with listening to our customers when they say: “We don’t like this or this can be better.”

Fort Collins Brewery has seen close to 33% growth year-over-year. What are people really gravitating toward and how much has your distribution footprint and demand expanded into other markets?

Peters: We had been sitting around the same barrelage for quite some time. We hadn’t experienced a lot of growth from 2006 to 2010 or 2011. We kind of sat pretty flat because we were expanding our building and buying our new equipment. We upgraded to a 50-barrel system and added a centrifuge to replace our old filtering system.

We started to focus on how to get our ducks in a row first. We looked at staff and started focusing on company culture for two years — making sure that we were a place that people wanted to work and be part of as we shifted me over from GM to owner. During this last little bit, we’ve taken a long look at distribution and started focusing more on our home state. Listening to feedback, we heard a lot of criticism saying that we sold most of our beer outside of the state of Colorado. That wasn’t true, but we did have a large distribution footprint.

We invested in putting several more sales staff into the state. We wanted to make sure that, especially in our own hometown, that we were making a larger footprint here. Then we scaled back: We were in 24 states at one point, and we’re down to 18. We heard the adage that you could be a mile wide and not an inch deep, so we pulled back from distributors that weren’t as engaged with the brand and were more just order-takers. We wanted to work with distributors who care about craft and who were making a difference to craft and who were e-mailing and calling us back. Because that’s difficult. Sometimes you can’t even get a hold of them, and that makes it very hard to do a partnership and have business.

We just saw a similar scenario unfold with Victory Brewing in Pennsylvania as it partnered with Southern Tier in New York. It’s a re-regionalization of strategy where they’re defending their home turf. When you do that, it’s almost kind of a reintroduction to your hometown. What has the reaction been by people in your backyard to your recent overhaul?

Peters: We’ve been working on this since late summer and we’ve been working with our distribution partners. We value their feedback just as much as we do our consumers, and so they’ve been leaked materials here or there.

Initially, people are always shocked when you make this amount of change to a brand that’s existed for more than 10 years. I’d say about 95% of them felt that it was time. I’d say it gave them an opportunity to be open and honest about where we were in the past and some of the troubles we faced with beer being what’s on trend. Our styles were a little older, and it was OK to discuss some of the history and some of the brand packaging being a little dated. And we can say “yes, you know, it was a little dated, but how do we move forward?”

The cans have taken center point with distribution. We’ve been looking at cans for about two years now and went down to the Craft Brewers Conference when it was in Denver and looked at all the equipment and put the plan together. For us, we didn’t want to turn our backs on 10 years of history, so we decided to do the split. The core brands would go into cans and it would allow us to have more versatility, especially as we focus regionally. People take their cans everywhere, we’re outside all the time and we want to be part of that, but don’t want to turn our backs on 12 years of data that say that bottles are great vessels for craft beer.

We figured that this year would be a great opportunity to go neck and neck and see how cans would work for us and how the consumer would relate to it, and then we’ll also have seasonal bottles. Then we can take that data at the end of the year and either say cans are really where it’s at and transition into a full can brewery or that we like the way it separates the two and use both the bottles and the cans.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.

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